This IT pilot fish leaves his job at a big law firm, and a few years later decides he has a tale to tell in an online forum for anonymized tech stories.

"I wrote about an incident involving network security, a lawyer who felt that network policies didn't apply to him, an intransigent head secretary, and an IT manager who didn't see any problem until it became widely and embarrassingly obvious," says fish.

"Flush with excitement at my literary effort bearing fruit, I emailed a short note with a link to the story to a former co-worker still at the law firm."

But later that morning, fish gets a call from his ex-cohort. It seems that just a week earlier, the law firm's email system was reconfigured, and the address that previously went only to his friend now forwards email to all senior staff at the main office.

And that includes two of the three main players in the original story.

Fish's erstwhile co-worker tells him -- between fits of giggling -- that her phone has been busy all day with people calling up to ask "Is that story about us?"

Not surprisingly, the callers don't include the people actually involved in the tale -- and the story is sufficiently well-scrubbed that no one else can even identify for certain what state it occurred in, much less what law firm was involved.

"As I later heard, there was a bit of good to come from this," fish says. "The firm had acquired new top brass since my time there, and after reading the story they decided it might be a good idea to pay more attention to network security.

"A security audit was performed and network policies were reviewed, tightened up and -- for the first time -- actively enforced."

Get scrubbed with Sharky.Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. I'll file off the identifying marks and you'll score a sharp Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

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